As part of our recent funding call for projects testing combination therapies, Cure Parkinson’s has put together a new expert panel to assess the applications and recommend the most promising projects for funding.
What is the funding call about?
One of the four pillars of our updated research strategy is to champion the development of combination therapies. These are therapies that involve two or more active treatments to achieve a desired effect. For example, the drug “co-careldopa” – one of the most common symptomatic Parkinson’s medications – is a combination of levodopa and carbidopa.
If combination therapies are already being used for treating Parkinson’s symptoms, then it feels logical that they could also be used for disease modification – to slow or stop progression of the condition. To encourage researchers to explore this area further, Cure Parkinson’s launched a £2 million grant funding call last October. This call asked researchers to submit proposals for both preclinical (laboratory) and clinical projects testing combination therapies. The application period is now closed, and submissions will be reviewed by an independent panel.
Why do we need a panel evaluation?
Every application we receive must be evaluated by an independent body to ensure that it is scientifically sound, aligns with our charity’s mission, and will provide results that are meaningful to the Parkinson’s community. For our quarterly funding rounds and iLCT Pipeline Research Acceleration grants, this is done by our research committee. Projects that are approved by the committee can then be recommended to our board of trustees for funding.
It is important that these evaluation bodies contain experts with the relevant background and knowledge to assess projects accurately and fairly. Therefore, for the combination therapies funding call, we have assembled a new evaluation panel with strong expertise in areas including drug discovery and development, statistics, pharmacology, and clinical trials to assess the applications received.
This panel contains a range of individuals from various backgrounds, including academics, industry representatives, clinicians, and people with Parkinson’s. This panel will be chaired by Professor Fiona Ducotterd, Chief Scientific Officer of the Alzheimer’s Research UK UCL Drug Discovery Institute (UDDI), who has strong experience in both neuroscience and drug development. We are excited to work alongside our new evaluation panel for the purposes of this funding call and are grateful for their valuable contributions and insights.
To progress potential treatment combinations into clinical trials, we must conduct a deep and stringent scientific assessment of the possible benefits and risks of the drugs alone and in combination. We’ve convened an experienced panel of drug developers from academia and industry to assess these proposals and identify those with significant promise in the supporting data to show patient benefit. We are excited to dive in and build out this new combination portfolio plan for the first time and see how it progresses in the direction of patients to make a difference.
Professor Fiona Ducotterd, Chair of the Combination Therapies Panel
